Netdev Day 1: IPsec!

Today at the conference I learned a lot about IPsec, so we’re going to talk about IPsec! There was an IPsec workshop given by Sowmini Varadhan and Paul Wouters. All of the mistakes in this post are 100% my fault though :).

what’s IPsec?

IPsec is a protocol used to encrypt IP packets. Some VPNs are implemented with IPsec. One big thing I hadn’t really realized until today is that there isn’t just one protocol used for VPNs – I think VPN is just a general term meaning “your IP packets get encrypted and sent through another server” and VPNs can be implemented using a bunch of different protocols (OpenVPN, PPTP, SSTP, IPsec, etc) in a bunch of different ways.

Why is IPsec different from other VPN protocols? (like, why was there a tutorial about it at netdev and not the other protocols?) My understanding is that there are 2 things that make it different:

It’s an IETF standard, documented in eg RFC 6071 (did you know the IETF is the group that makes RFCs? I didn’t until today!)

it’s implemented in the Linux kernel (so it makes sense that there was a netdev tutorial on it, since netdev is a Linux kernel networking conference :))